The River Loire today, Loireauxence, Loire-Atlantique, France 🇫🇷 pic.twitter.com/eztDQLezVZ

— Desomag (@Desomag) August 10, 2022

Israeli occupation forces attacking Palestinian medics, March 12, 2018 in Birzeit town north of Ramallah from socialism

This is Orwellian. The term is overused, of course, but it fits here. And DeSantis is a fascist:

https://newrepublic.com/article/169937/new-college-desantis-rufo-crackdown

Excerpt:

Jack McCordick/
January 11, 2023
Under Threat
A Florida College Goes to War With Ron DeSantis
As the governor plots to topple Sarasota’s New College, the students of the historic liberal arts institution prepare to rise in its defense.

What’s past is prologue. From 1956 to 1965, the state of Florida underwent a government-led campaign to root out LGBTQ people, civil rights activists, and supposed Communists from state institutions. Halfway through this McCarthyite witch hunt, which purged hundreds of students and teachers from the state’s universities, the chairman of a recently founded college in Sarasota spoke to Time magazine about his school, then aptly named “New College.” The chairman—coincidentally a third cousin of Alger Hiss, the government official whose 1948 espionage case helped lay the groundwork for the Second Red Scare—declared that the college would operate with “complete freedom of inquiry” and “no canned patriotism.”

Over the next half-century, New College developed a reputation for providing a top-notch liberal arts education, inspired by the tutorial model of its Oxford eponym. It was the first college or university in Florida to establish an open admissions policy, pledging not to discriminate based on “race, creed, national origin, or cultural status,” and was one of the first in the country to establish a program in environmental studies, an especially prescient move for a school located in one of the country’s most climate-vulnerable cities. It also became known as a haven for queer and transgender students: In 2021, a Harvard sociologist who previously taught at New College published a study on the school’s trans population and found that they “provide overwhelmingly positive assessments of their campus culture as related to issues of gender identity, a stark contrast to existing literature on gender-nonconforming collegians.” One former student estimated that 10 percent of the school is trans.

New College is undoubtedly a liberal enclave: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis carried Sarasota County by over 20 points in November, and two months earlier a slate of MAGA candidates won a local school board election with support from the Proud Boys. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the school would find itself in the crosshairs of DeSantis’s ongoing neo-McCarthyite crusade. On Friday morning, DeSantis announced six appointees to the New School board of trustees. Of the six, the three most eye-catching are Christopher Rufo, who’s risen to notoriety as one of the best-known voices inveighing against “critical race theory” and stoking back-in-vogue incendiary anti-LGBTQ rhetoric; Charles Kesler, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a far-right think tank; and Matthew Spalding, a professor of government at Michigan’s Hillsdale College, a deeply conservative private Christian college that both Rufo and DeSantis’s chief of staff explicitly held up as a model for the Florida school.

The governor’s press release didn’t elaborate on the new board members’ agenda. But in a tweet, Rufo said the group will seek to a create a new core curriculum, “abolish ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ and replace it with ‘equality, merit, and colorblindness,’” hire faculty “with expertise in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles,” and restructure academic departments “to reflect the new pedagogical approach,” among other policy changes. New College regulations give its trustees expansive powers to regulate student life and establish or discontinue degree programs and course offerings, so all of these changes are possible under a new right-wing majority, though attempts to fire tenured professors without cause would likely run afoul of the university’s collective bargaining agreement.

“Under the leadership of Gov. DeSantis, our all-star board will demonstrate that the public universities, which have been corrupted by woke nihilism, can be recaptured, restructured, and reformed,” Rufo wrote on Friday. In an interview with The New York Times, he added that he hopes this takeover will spur conservative state legislators “to reconquer public institutions all over the United States.”

. . . .

There is no such thing as a $2.2 million dollar watch.

I can get a watch for ten bucks that does the same thing.

The remaining $2,199,990 is just to rub it in everyone else’s face.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Zooey.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 10 months ago by Zooey.